Archive | April 2013

I have to say that if there was ever to be a bright side to radiation therapy, for me it was having our elder daughter, Frith, come over from Australia to support, help out, and keep me company over the last week of treatment. I so enjoyed having that week with her, if not the treatment itself.

The last day at Margaret Stewart House was a bit frenetic. Basically we had to clean out and pack up our temporary home for the past six weeks and leave it, bright, shiny and new for the next lot of people who were coming into it the following Monday. I started the day by stripping beds and gathering all the towels etc and did 5 loads of washing and hung it out, and at that stage of the treatment, that in itself was pretty exhausting. Frith made up the beds with clean linen and cleaned out the bathroom.

By then it was time for the last treatment. The last walk to the hospital, the last time I would have to subject myself to the indignity of being pushed into place, arms outstretched, half naked, so that that machine could burn my boob to a frazzle. After that came the last session with the hospital doctor , more dressings in hand and off I went. By the time I left I had dressing in two places, one preventative and the other healing up the one place where the skin had burst. I went away with a plastic bag full of dressings and supplies of the four different ointments/gels I had to apply to various bits of my boob. The craziest thing of all was how the treatment for this disease has been way worse than I ever felt before I had to start out on this journey . I was, and am, more run down by the surgery and treatment for the disease than I was by the disease itself. The relief of all those “lasts” was immense. That done, it was back to the house for a bite of lunch, vacuuming out the room and then we ere essentially done with what had to be done before we left, but in the afternoon, Frith cooked up more meals for me to take home to make the following week a bit easier.

That night we went out and celebrated Frith’s last day with us and my last day of treatment with a dinner at Logan Brown, one of Wellington’s foremost award winning restaurants. Absolutely divine meal, and then, for us, the last drive home, not that we won’t have to undertake the same journey over the hill many times more but going home that night was more special than most other trips we have made.

Waking up on Saturday morning in our own bed, together with our two cats to a brilliantly clear sky and sunny day was just the best feeling. So for the past three weeks I have one by one been able to stop using the great supply of dressings and unguents, and while my boob won’t ever be the same again its finally no longer a hot pink boob sending me into drip mode with almost any move I made. It’s a brown one now – but with out the internal combustion engine it contained before. Some time soon I guess the brown will fade and I’ll be left with just the scars. But now I am into hormone therapy treatment, just one pill a day but the side effects are to give one menopausal symptoms all over again. Oh joy!

The most lasting effect and the one I am finding harder to come to terms with is the fatigue. I was already quite fatigued when I left the House, having almost daily nana naps. My need for those nana naps has not yet diminished and most days I am even sleeping on to 8am or sometimes even 9am before rising for the day, but by afternoons I am just wiped out. All I need do is sit in an armchair and I’m out to the count for 2 hours or more. It’s actually quite debilitating in the way that it wipes out half of my day.

Wisely, I think, I pulled out of officiating at National Track and Field Championships in Auckland which was due to start 6 days after my last treatment. Looking back there was no way I could have given my best at those championships. However, I had agreed to be Meeting Manager for North Island Secondary Secondary Schools, a Track and Field Meeting held in Masterton (only 20 minutes from home) this last weekend. Most of the literature I have been reading has been assuring me that I would be back to normal within three weeks of treatment ending, and I thought I should be able to manage it OK. It was a 1.5 day meeting compared to Nationals being a 3 day meet. The first day of the meet was a bit like the first day of my treatment, one where the most major thing that could go wrong did go wrong and the track programme was eventually running 2 hours behind. The final races for the day were run in the dark. We, Peter and I, our house guest for the weekend, and two other friends who were up from Wellington for the meet, eventually sat down to dinner at 9.30pm that evening. I had actually managed to hold myself together without my nana nap that day but I was not too far off total exhaustion by the end of the evening. The end of Daylight saving gave me a bit extra time to sleep, but I still overslept and didn’t get to the park at quite the hour I had planned. Sunday was the half day part of the meet with the last race due to start about 12.30pm. The major part of Saturday’s problem had been fixed so the track ran much more to schedule but all of the field events were in dire need of officials. Many of the Officials I had had the day before didn’t return, so my attention was diverted more by those events rather than the track, but when they were successfully concluded and there were just 3 track events to run I could feel that I was in danger of losing everything and just had to retreat to a chair and some warmth of the upstairs bolthole for officials. One friend made the comment that she had been afraid for me as I had looked as white as a sheet when I walked in. But for some reason or other lunch seemed to cure my colour, if not the feeling of sheer exhaustion.

In his usual manner Peter couldn’t leave until he had helped pack things away at the end of the meet and we didn’t arrive home till approaching 3.30pm. By 4pm I was out to it in the armchair, and Peter went off and did the supermarket shopping, unpacked it, put the remnants of the night before’s dinner on to heat up, all a few feet away from me, while I slept the sleep of the dead, until my phone alarm went off, 12 hours later than I thought I had set it for, at 6.30pm. I seem to have done little else but sleep for the past two days, but at least today I woke up at 7pm, so maybe the weekend has finally worn off. Just as well it was the last track meeting of the season.